Early years of comedy in Kolkata
Stand-up comedy arrived surprisingly late to the city of thinkers. And for years, funnymen like Anirban Dasgupta hustled to cultivate a space for this genre of performance where comedy doubles up as cultural mediation. Dasgupta currently has over 162,000 subscribers on YouTube, along with a stand-up special (Take It Easy) and a comedy series (the brilliant Afsos, starring Gulshan Devaiah) on Amazon Prime and was witness to Kolkata’s first-ever comedy open mic.
“The organisers of the city’s first open mic had advertised in the papers and had offered a cash prize of Rs 1 lakh for the winner. They booked the entire GD Birla Sabhaghar, and only three people turned up for the mic, and the winner of that show has actually left comedy! The other two were me and Vaibhav Sethia,” Dasgupta laughs as he admits he ran out of material a minute early.
The comedian who harboured dreams of becoming a journalist was brought up in Kolkata’s Minto Park and did his schooling at Apeejay School, Park Street. He came across Russell Peters’ stand-up videos on YouTube while he was pursuing engineering in Pune, and realised that live comedy was a viable art form
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The comedian who harboured dreams of becoming a journalist was brought up in Kolkata’s Minto Park and did his schooling at Apeejay School, Park Street. He came across Russell Peters’ stand-up videos on YouTube while he was pursuing engineering in Pune, and realised that live comedy was a viable art form.
But love for comedy did very little for Dasgupta in a city without comedy clubs. Despite running his own humour blog, Dasgupta could only start doing live stand-up in 2013, after he returned to Kolkata for a sales job.
Building a scene when there was none
But back then the only stage time available for local names was as opening acts for other bigwigs like Vir Das, Papa CJ or the now-defunct AIB, who'd perform about once a month. Dasgupta banded together with Sethia and Sourav Ghosh to organise open mics around the city, to ‘build a scene’ so to speak.
“The first few venues were Mocha, The Tea Trove and Someplace Else. We would beg restaurant and bar owners to let us perform, and we did shows literally anywhere we could. Be it Salt Lake or Park Street, if a room owner showed interest, we’d show up with a mic and speaker. At that point, comedy sketches were blowing up on YouTube, and comics were gaining a following on Twitter, so more rooms started opening up,” he said. Soon, the rooms started getting bigger, and they started bagging weekly and monthly deals with five-star hotels in the city such as Taj Bengal. Dasgupta tells us that by 2015, they were doing as many as eight spots a week, which was something only heard of in comedy circuits of Mumbai and Delhi.
The move to Mumbai
For two years he held on to his day job while still performing stand-up but eventually Dasgupta decided to take the plunge, and quit his job to move to Mumbai and pursue comedy full-time.
“It was relieving to be in a line-up where Sourav, Vaibhav and I weren’t the only comics, and the diversity in Mumbai’s stand-up circuit helped us. The rooms were better, and there was so much to learn. The good thing was that we didn’t move before we were ready, and the three-year groundwork where I had worked some terrible rooms in Kolkata, allowed me to manage tough rooms in Mumbai too,” the comedian reveals.
Developing his stand-up skills before landing amid the cut-throat Mumbai circuit was a good move, ventures the comedian as there is a staggering number of comics competing for spots. Dasgupta admits he only left his job when he was making almost the same amount of money from comedy as he was making in his day job.
“I had savings set aside for my first couple of years, so I could focus on stand-up without having to worry about my next paycheck. Besides this, the presence of the media, advertising and film industries in Mumbai provided me with plenty of writing jobs, the first of which was as head writer for the second season of Son of Abish. However, these writing gigs can often take away from your act because, after a point, they are about deadlines, long hours and bosses, so I only made short-term commitments,” explains the Norm Macdonald fan.
From stage to OTT
His inaugural comedy special Take It Easy with Amazon Prime Video was a breakthrough on all counts. “I was writing a bit about the culture of offence that I had hoped to release on YouTube as a 25-minute mini-special; it would have been very different from the 5-6 minute bits that most comics were dropping on the platform. However, when I started touring, it just thematically came together, and I didn’t put it out on YouTube because I realised it could be a potential special. My management at OML brought Amazon in for the special deal towards the end of 2017, and that’s how it happened,” says the comedian.
Dasgupta developed the 2020 black comedy series Afsos with his school friend, Dibya Chatterjee. The idea for the show germinated when Dasgupta first moved to Mumbai and would crash at Chatterjee’s place. “Dibya originally envisaged it as a Bengali movie about a guy who wants to kill himself but can’t. All OTT platforms were setting up their offices in the country around that time, and we pitched it back in 2015. Although it wasn’t greenlit, we received positive feedback from everyone. Over the next few years, I focused on my stand-up, while Dibya set up his production house, but Afsos never left our minds, and we would discuss new ideas on call every week. Once again, we pitched the show to Amazon in 2017, and they were extremely supportive and asked us to not hold back on the absurdity of the script,” he recalls.
Back to his hometown
Kolkata seems to be a recurring motif across Dasgupta’s work, a place he keeps coming back to, literally and figuratively. “My upbringing in the city has been a huge influence on my stand-up. Even now in any of my shows, I always have a story from my time here. The funny thing is that most comics talk about having a bad childhood, while I actually had a great childhood in the city,” he chuckles.
The comedian is headed back to his home city for a stand-up show at TopCat Retired Comedy Club on November 13.
He hopes to start working on his new hour soon, and also tell us that he is writing a film although he had precious little to give away in terms of plot points. Maybe his upcoming shows could hold some clues?